Dehorning a Cow

16-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:

Friday, March 8, 1912: I think I came out fairly in General History today. I remembered all of my speech, but as my custom is I never get enough pauses and proper way of speaking in the thing. This time it was too fast. Are going to have them again next Friday. They ought to be pretty well digested by that time.

Mollie was shorn of her horns today. Poor thing, I hope she won’t kick the bucket. But I don’t think she will.

Photo source: The Farm Dairy (1908) by H. B. Gurler

Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:

Mollie was Grandma’s cow. Based on previous diary entries it seems as if each of the Muffly girls owned one the family’s cows.

I’m surprised that Mollie’s horns were removed when she was so old. I think that typically horns would either be removed when the cow was younger than this—or the cow would never be dehorned. My gut feeling is that Mollie was acting aggressively toward other cows with her horns—and that as a result ended up being dehorned.

The horns would have been cut off with a tool designed for that purpose. Mollie probably bled quite a bit afterwards—and there would have been the risk of infection.

Dehorning would have been very painful for a few days—though I doubt that there was much chance that the dehorning might actually cause a cow to die (kick the bucket).

As always, I love Helena’s personality, and I love your interpretive comments. What a great combination! This could evolve into a history-picture book type of thing, with all the research you’ve done. Have you kept notes?

Thanks for the nice note! I guess that the posts themselves are basically my notes. Someday, if I have the energy, I might try to reorganize some of the information in the posts into some sort of book.